Friday, May 02, 2003

the conflict was not doomed to turn the cities into
meat-grinder urban battlefields, à la Stalingrad. The
post-mortems on that will be interesting reads.

I still haven't read much about why exactly the dug-in
Republican Guard city divisions dried up and blew away. It doesn't
seem to be because the Americans have some special tricks for
scattering determined, dug-in opposition, witness the problems they've
had later on just dealing with unruly crowds. Well, now comes Henry
Liu to offer this
explanation, amid other interesting observations:

The "victory" appeared to be less than honorable, achieved mainly
through treason on the part of the enemy high command induced by
bribes. The Battle of Baghdad was no Iwo Jima or Stalingrad. It
appeared that the massive precision bombing did not destroy the Iraqi
army as much as treason facilitated through the uninterrupted linkage
between the Iraqi high command and its former handlers in the US
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Pentagon Special Section. If
these conspiracy theories are valid, then the question arises whether
the intensive bombings of Baghdad and other cities, with tragic
collateral damage of sizable civilian casualty, were militarily
necessary, and whether the chaos after the fall of Baghdad was part of
the war plan. ...

Le Monde, the French daily, reported that Maher Sufyan, commander of
the Republican Guard, reached an agreement to cease resistance in
exchange for money and postwar protection for himself and his top
officers. Maher Sufyan is not included in the infamous "deck of cards"
identifying the most wanted officials in the Saddam Hussein
government. Iraq's information minister, Mohammed Saeed Al Sahaf, its
foreign minister, Naji Sabri, and the minister of health, Oumid Medhat
Mubarak, are also not included on the list. Vladimir Titirenko, the
Russian ambassador to Iraq, told NTV upon returning to Moscow: "I am
confident that the Iraqi generals entered into secret deals with the
Americans to refrain from resistance in exchange for sparing their
lives."

Not all of these folks may be cooperating -- American forces just
don't seem to care about al-Sahhaf, as I noted below -- but the case
of Sufyan is interesting, to say the least. And it also fits with the
well-reported oddity that for most of the time of the Baghdad bombing
raids, the bombers seemed to be deliberately avoiding the civilian
phone network -- almost as if they needed it to talk to somebody.
(And the less well-reported fact that bribe-induced side switching was
critical
to the apparent quick win in Afghanistan -- I say apparent because we
have plenty of unfinished business there, but that's another
rant).

Of course, as Liu goes on to note, this strategy may not work
against leadership elsewhere which is capable of inspiring loyalty.
Which may make it of limited use elsewhere...